Fabian Garcia
Audio By Carbonatix
“On the hospital bed, I literally just sat there with my baby in my hands, and I thought, ‘No,'” Alex Alicea recalls. “‘This is not how my life is gonna go. I’m not going to continue living a lie.'”
Four years ago, Alicea left Miami with her newborn son to escape an abusive relationship and start over in Texas. After giving birth a few months earlier, she’d decided she was done living her life on other people’s terms and was going to relentlessly pursue her dream of becoming a successful musician.
“When I moved here, my son was a newborn, maybe 2 or 3 months old, and I had two dollars to my name,” Alicea says. “I didn’t have a car, so my friend drove me to Texas, and when I got here, I lived in Haslet, which is like the middle of nowhere. The only person I knew here was my half-brother, and I barely knew him, so I was just taking a risk.”
Up to that point, Alicea had been studying for a degree she didn’t really want; her real passion was for making music.
“I had been going to college for psychology, and I just didn’t want to do that,” she says. “I liked it, but I was just doing it because it was something my parents wanted me to do. So, I sat there and looked around and just thought, ‘Nah. We’re gonna start fresh, and we’re gonna do what we want to do, and that’s what I’m gonna show my son.'”
Taking the name TEARS, which she says are “at the extremes of all emotions (joy, fear, pain, anger),” Alicea began recording and releasing music. Shortly after moving to Texas she inadvertently met the guy who would become her main producer and collaborator while using a friend-finding app.
“When I lived in Haslet, I didn’t make any friends because there’s not a lot of people … there are farmers,” she says, joking. “So, I got on a friendship app, and I decided to put just my music on my profile, no pictures or anything. One day, I was on the app and someone messaged me, ‘Hey, my friend wants to work with you! He really likes your music, do you want to meet up?'” and I was like, OK, fine.
“I didn’t have any friends, so what else was I gonna do? This was during COVID, mind you, so at first, I was really hesitant. I had my son with me, and I just went to Dallas. I met up with a group of people, and the situation would’ve been super sketchy, but they were all really great. I was introduced to my producer [AZ] by the guy that was on the app, and everything matched. We had the same taste in music, we both like horror and dark stuff … If he would’ve swiped left, I probably never would’ve met him.”
The two creatives have grown significantly through working together over the past four years, constantly pushing each other to explore new ideas sonically. And it all goes back to AZ’s friend swiping right on an app.
“He didn’t take music seriously until he met me,” Alicea says. “We’ve both grown with each other. I would ask, ‘Hey, do you know how to make a reggaeton beat?'” and he’d say, ‘No, but I can learn,’ and he’s learned how to make so many genres because we’ve grown together. I didn’t know how to make any of those things, either, I just wanted to try, and he wanted to try too. We’re both nomadic generalists, so it works because we love everything and try to make things we’ve never made before. It’s really hard to find a producer where it just instantly clicks and works.”
The diverse range of sounds in Alicea’s music can be attributed to her transient upbringing. Her song “BYE” is a heavily produced reggaeton jam, while “aNoThEr mOoN” is more vulnerable and laid back; tracks like the bouncy R&B-based “Switchin Up” land somewhere in between. She was born in Puerto Rico but moved around a lot as a child, so it’s likely she’s seen more of the States than most of the people born here.
“I’m a bit of a nomad,” she says. “My parents were divorced, and my mom married a guy that was in the military, so that’s why I ended up moving so much … I’ve adopted so many things throughout my lifetime because I’ve been so many places and around so many people.”
Her time in Virginia and Florida had a heavy influence on the sounds she was exposed to and helped shape her musical palette.
“Virginia is mostly white people, Black people and Filipino people, and there’s no Hispanics,” Alicea says. “There, I learned a lot of pop-punk stuff like Boys Like Girls, Paramore, All Time Low … I was definitely a little scene kid. There’s a big surf community over there too, which is weird – in Virginia? – but I lived in Virginia Beach, so it was on the coast. It was a mix of everything, minus Hispanics, so I was the only one. I had to find somewhere I could fit in, but I didn’t, so I just kind of fit in everywhere. It was a complete shift when I moved to Miami.
“In Miami there’s a lot of Latin influence because there are so many people from like Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba…” she continues. “I learned the majority of my Spanish in Miami. It was my first language, but I guess growing up in the U.S., I had to assimilate, and English took over. Once I moved to Miami, that’s where I learned a bigger vocabulary. It’s just a mixture of so many cultures that it’s hard not to be inspired by it, and you’re living in it, so it kind of adopted me.”
In her latest single, “Ayer,” Alicea looks back at the toxic relationship that drove her to Texas over a surprisingly upbeat instrumental that’s easy to vibe to despite the gloomy lyrics. “I couldn’t escape / I can’t erase you / My biggest mistake / I wish I never knew you.”
“At first, it sounds like a breakup song, but it’s really about PTSD,” she explains. “I’d rather not go into too much detail about my past relationship, but he was an addict, and I didn’t know. It was behind my back; he was a functioning addict. It caused a lot of trauma, and if anyone’s ever been with an addict or the mother or the son of an addict, it’s probably a lot more difficult for them than it is for the addict. That song is about trying to forget everything but not being able to because I have a son that reminds me of it every day. That’s what the song is about, but it can also be about heartbreak and not being able to forget this person that you spent all this time with.”
Going forward, Alicea is looking to further expand her mixed bag of sounds to set a reputation as someone who can’t be pigeonholed into any single style of music.
“This year, I’m gonna be releasing singles for the most part, because I’m working with Oren Yoel,” Alicea says. “He’s one of Miley Cirus’ producers. We’re doing this thing where we’re collaborating on each song now, so we’re trying different things. This one is gonna be completely different from the next one. I just want people to never know what’s coming next, and I’m also someone that likes to experiment.”
She also recently acquired a distribution deal, which she hopes will help land her on more people’s playlists.
“Lowkey, I wanna be the female Bad Bunny,” Alicea says with a laugh. “I just want to create a new movement. I want to be somebody for everybody, if that makes sense. I don’t want to limit myself to just represent a few people, I want everybody to feel like we’re all in this together. Especially with everything that’s happening right now, it can be really easy to feel alone and depressed and like nothing’s going to change. … I just want to start a movement, and he did that by just being different, being himself and not really caring what people thought, and now he’s huge.”
Ultimately, Alicea wants to become a star so that she can help people who are going through the same struggles she has.
“The reason why I want to be big isn’t just because of fame,” Alicea says. “A lot of people think that artists only want that, but the reason why I want to be big is because I want to help people who were in the same position as me when I was a broke, single mom with nobody and nothing. I want to eventually open places where people can go to pursue their dreams when they don’t have the means to. I also want to fund single-parent programs.
“I want to help, when I get famous … ” she says, suddenly pausing and chuckling at the unintentionally loaded statement before doubling down: “When I get famous, none of that is ever going to stop me from my true calling, which is helping people. That’s why I want to be famous. I don’t want cars and money and all that shit. That doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m still gonna shop at Ross, you know?”
